Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs

 Way back in 1971, the Five Man Electrical Band had a hit with their songs. If you know it, then you know the story of a long-haired freaky person fed up with all the directions and restrictions for the free-loving life he wants to lead. And if you don't know it, then I'll let you have four minutes to take it all in from the link above.

Good. Now, where was I? Oh, right: signs. In the fifty-two years since the song was released, the number of placards, billboards, posters and advertisements has done nothing but increase. Blocking out the scenery, indeed. And it seems to me that our human reaction to this sensory overload has not been to rail against them, but to simply ignore them. 

My younger brother refers to this syndrome as "victory through apathy." I have had discussions with a number of folks and we share a common belief that this attitude is best witnessed at Stop signs. A fellow educator and I have stood by as we supervise children waiting for their parents to pick them up after school has been dismissed, watching car after car roll or roar right through the four-way stop on the corner. We have a crossing guard there whose orange vest and hand held sign seems to carry enough authority to get drivers to apply their brakes, but without anyone in the intersection, the directive given by those bright red octagons seem to be merely a suggestion. They don't apply to everyone. 

In this way, the hippie from 1971 seems to have won. That's right, stick it to the man! We're not sheep. Nobody can tell us where to come to a complete and full stop. We'll stop when we feel like it. Not before. 

Which works really well as a statement of your personal freedom, but not so much in the realm of community agreements. This is perhaps the most obvious form of obliviousness, but the one that jumps out in more passive ways is our cavalier attitudes toward parking restrictions. I have written here before about the insistence of ride-share drivers who insist on parking in the middle of the street, sometimes with their hazard lights on, sometimes not, waiting for their fares. Quite often they are feet away from an open parking spot, or at least a driveway into which they could tuck themselves out of traffic. The rider is the only one it seems who is not inconvenienced by this choice. Furthermore, it seems to have affected the way our parents stop in front of our school to pick up their kids. Rather than pull up to the curb to wait, they will stop in the lane of what might have been traffic to wait in the most impatient way possible. And then there are those who do this same thing, but upon deciding they have business with someone inside the school building, they leave their car in the middle of the street sometimes running and sometimes not, locked without any way to move it until they reappear with their personal agenda completed. 

Most of the rest of the day, inside that school, we are teaching kids how to read: Stop. No parking. Yield. And we hope that when they go outside in that flurry of words and signs, we hope they have the means to choose wisely which ones to follow.